


Impossible Things

by ungoodpirate



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M, M/M, Minor Adam Parrish/Blue Sargeant, Noah and Henry in small roles, Soulmate AU, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, bluesy - Freeform, pynch - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-18
Updated: 2017-01-18
Packaged: 2018-09-18 08:00:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,739
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9375593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ungoodpirate/pseuds/ungoodpirate
Summary: Adam Parrish didn’t have time to think about soulmates. Ronan Lynch didn’t seem like the type to put stock in the idea. Blue Sargent hated the idea of soulmates in general, and hated her soulmate in particular. Richard Campbell Gansey III believed in impossible things.A Pynch and Bluesy soulmate AU that no one needed, but that I wrote anyway. Vaguely follows the plotline/timeline of the books.





	

Adam Parrish didn’t have time to think about soulmates. Adam Parrish was trying to survive. 

Like everyone else, on the inside of his dominant arm, just below his elbow, were two initials in a pinpoint thin script. These initials belonged to whoever destiny or god or genetics -- the world was still debating -- had decided was his perfect match. The only thing he and everyone else had to do was find whoever had a name that matched their initials, and who had initials to match thier name back. 

Unlike his classmates at Henrietta’s public school, Adam didn’t have the time or interest to scour the class directories hoping to find a potential match. He was too preoccupied tiptoeing around his father’s bad moods, hiding bruises, working two jobs, and studying his ass off so he could get into Aglionby Academy, so he could study his ass off to get into a good college, so he could work his ass off so he could make enough money that he didn’t have to worry about having enough money to eat or fix his bike or buy clothes that weren’t secondhand. 

Adam was too busy figuring out how to get out his fate of being stuck in this town, of living his father’s life repeated, to be concerned with finding his soulmate right now. After all, he was so desperate to get out of Henrietta, he couldn’t imagine his soulmate being here. 

-

Blue Sargent hated the idea of soulmates in general, and hated her soulmate in particular. 

Blue didn’t know her soulmate. She had their initials on her arm and lifetime of prophecies from the psychics she lived with that she would, inevitably, kill him. If the future was sure (and in this case, the prediction was both accurate and specific, hallmarks of surety when it came to the other realms of magic and the future), and she indeed would kill him, how could the system of soulmates -- in general -- or her soulmate -- in particular -- be anything but bunk or defective. 

She was a strong, single woman. She didn’t need a soulmate. 

Also, what kind of pretentious ass initials were RCG III anyway.

-

Ronan Lynch, as he was now, didn’t seem like the type to put much stock in soulmates. As he was now -- with a nine hundred dollar tattoo spread across the expanse of his back, with a twitch in his limbs to break things, with an emotional range of less angry to livid. 

But he used to be the middle of three brothers, with a mother and father who loved them and each other. Finding his soulmate, eventually, unfolding in the natural progress of his fantastically pleasant life, was something he assumed would happen and that he would be happy with. The only hiccup he ever had with it was a point in his adolescence when he realized the initials on his arm would belong to another boy. 

As he was now, Ronan Lynch, barbed wire personified, would only look at the initials in the crest of his arm sometimes. When it was early-hours-of-the-morning dark outside and he was trying to avoid sleep, when he needed a promise of tomorrow where everything wasn’t fucked up. 

-

Richard Campbell Gansey III believed in impossible things -- ley lines, near death miracles, and magic. It wasn’t difficult for him to believe in soulmates. 

Once, a well-meaning museum curator who didn’t quite seem to take Gansey seriously for his age, said, good-naturedly, “You should you all your researching skills towards something important for a boy your age. Like finding your soulmate.” He peppered this last point with a wink.

Gansey pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, folded his hands in his lap -- the model of manners -- and said, “I have researched soulmates, in the historical perspective, and it seems to me that the way it’s supposed to work is for it to be someone you naturally run across in the course of your life.” 

He doesn’t mention his almost death in his youth, how that inspired him to search into both things: Glendower and what it means for your soulmate, if you die too soon.

-

Soulmate initials were so small and thin-scripted, it was difficult for one to see another’s by accident. They were seen as a private thing, although how private changed with the place and the generation. Nowadays, it wasn’t strange for it to be listed in dating profiles and Twitter handles, alongside star signs and favorite colors. 

It could be private, though, a confidence between friends. 

When Gansey showed Ronan his soulmate initials, Ronan laughed, head tilted towards the sky. 

“You could’ve warned me,” Ronan said, after he calmed a bit. “BS. Your soulmate is bull shit.” 

This wasn’t the way Gansey had expected this to go. It had never gone this way before, but the few people who knew these initials were doctors -- professionals -- or his family -- who were calculated polite. This was Ronan, rough-edged but genuine. 

“I’m sure that’s not her name,” Gansey said evenly as more of Ronan’s humor sobered away. 

“You showed me yours,” Ronan said, and he pulled up sleeve of his uniform shirt with no regard for wrinkles or ripping, and shoved his arm in front of Gansey for inspection.

AP

“Any idea who it is?” Gansey asked, although probably unnecessarily. Most people didn’t hide found soulmates. 

“Nah,” Ronan said, yanking the sleeve back down, crossing his arms tight across his chest. “No idea.”

-

Ronan Lynch was peripherally aware of Adam Parrish, the quiet and studious kid in his Latin class. Had been from the first day, when Whelk went down roll call, and called out his disinterested drone: “Parrish, Adam.”

Ronan only paused momentarily in the defacement of his notebook cover. 

Ronan was no more aware of Adam Parrish than he was of Aiden Palamo, who had graduated last year, or Andrew Pruett, who sat behind him in English Lit. As far as Ronan figured it, a soulmate would have to distinguish themselves in a way more than having the correct letters in their name. 

Only thing Adam Parrish did that was noticeable was eating lunch alone, using the lunch hour to do his homework reading. 

And there on the periphery was Ronan content to let Adam stay, until the day Gansey adopted him. 

Suddenly, Adam was front and center and everywhere. Eating at their lunch table, riding along in Gansey’s camaro, tagging along on their Glendower adventures, and visiting Monmouth Manufacturing. 

To this new addition, Ronan reacted like himself -- angry and aggressive, and more jealous of Gansey’s new friendship than he would ever admit to. 

Parrish, dour and studious and otherwise friendless, took it with a clenched jaw and Gansey making wincing apologetic looks. Until the day Adam didn’t. 

Ronan couldn’t remember exactly what he had said or did in some combination to push Adam over the edge, but they were out in a field somewhere on a Saturday morning, Gansey trying to match up where they were with an antique paper map. 

“Do you have a fucking problem,” Adam had snapped. “Other than the obvious.”

In a shocked response, Ronan had barked out a laugh that startled some nearby sparrows into flight.

And so started a new balance between the three of them in which Adam would snap back at Ronan’s shit talking. Ronan liked him better for it, him acting like an actual person, an actual person who wasn’t afraid of him. And sometimes all the snapping and shit talking felt like a rapport. 

-

Adam found a waitress of Nino’s cute and Gansey, to Adam’s embarrassment, found himself involved as a matchmaker. Which went disastrously. And then alright. 

Her name ended up being Blue Sargent, which in no way match Adam’s soulmate initials, but they didn’t have to. People -- especially young people, teenagers and into twenties -- dated outside of their soulmate. It was considered good relationship practice and social skill building. For those who had to wait many, many years to meet their soulmate: companionship.

That was their unspoken arrangement, the idea they were pursuing, a courtship -- new ground for both of them -- entering it as wobbly and unsure as a fawn walking on new legs. It all ended rather quickly, though, when Adam accidentally saw her soulmate initials. 

He hadn’t been looking for them. He himself was intensely private with his, and he cultivated that same respect for everyone around him. He hadn’t shared his initials with Gansey, and hadn’t asked Gansey about his in return. It was not even a subject he would even consider broaching with Ronan. 

But they had been sitting snug next to each other in a helicopter, following the ley line, and he couldn’t stop looking over at her. She was mostly interested in the impressive view out the window. Adam eyes kept bouncing around from her profile, to the clips in her hair, down to where they sat hip-to-hip, the length of their legs touching, and wondering he if he should, if he could, reach out and take her hand in his. 

The helicopter dipped when it hit a pocket of air. Blue jerked as she found handhold to grab onto. Between them, her sleeve was dragged up past her elbow, and Adam had been looking right there, contemplating the biology of one hand holding another, and he saw it. He looked away just as quick, but it was too late. He had seen it. And it was obvious who it belonged to. 

That night, laying half-awake in bed, he tried to convince himself that he was going to step back from his relationship with Blue because it was the right thing to do. Gansey was Adam’s best friend, and deserved a chance to get to know his soulmate, even if Blue seemed to hate him at the moment. 

This was definitely it, Adam being a good friend. It had absolutely nothing to do with Adam not standing a chance against Gansey, with his white smile, easy charm, and trust fund. It was definitely not that. 

Many weeks later, after they had found Cabeswater, after they had found out about Noah, after Adam had made his bargain, after Blue went from hating Gansey to being moderately annoyed with him, the two of them talked about it. 

It was a rare moment, just of the two of them, out on the front steps of 300 Fox Way. Adam asked, “Does he know?”

Blue rubbed that spot on her forearm like it was paining her. “No.”

“And has he ever said anything about his --”

“No,” she answered, quicker. 

“He’s not that kind of guy,” Adam said, and as he said, had a sort of revelation about the nature of Gansey as a person. 

Gansey, a guy he had accused privately and publically of trying to own him, of treating his friends like things he was collecting. The same Gansey who wouldn’t tell someone they were his soulmate because he would never dream of using that to force their companionship. This second Gansey was the truer of the two. The first was more figment of Adam’s insecurities. Gansey, who could charm and convince, would never force anyone to do anything. 

The sun, on it’s downward glide through the atmosphere, was casting long shadows out of everything. 

Voice a little strange, a little high, Adam asked, “Do you like him?”

“He’s…” Blue trailed the ‘s’ off like a hiss. A moment later she picked up again. “He’s just so rich.”

Adam knew instantly what she meant. People like Gansey lived in a different reality than people like him and Blue. 

“I wish you hadn’t seen it,” Blue said. She was still rubbing at her forearm, now frowning at it too. 

“It was an a--”

“I know. But I still wish -- I wish we had had a chance. I think it would’ve been nice. While it lasted.”

She looped an arm through Adam’s and leaned her head on his shoulder, sadder than he could understand. Out far beyond them, the sun kissed the horizon.

-

Noah Czerny didn’t have soulmate initials on his arm. 

Blue as the one forward enough to ask about it, and Noah was so fond of her that he didn’t take offense. Noah rarely took offense to anything. He bared the length of his arm for her, but all of them lean in to glance. 

“I did,” Noah said, “When I was alive.” He seemed thin and feathery around the edges, his corporeal existence fragile. 

“I don’t… I didn’t…” He squinted down at his arm like it was an abstract piece of art. “I never met them.”

Blue sucked in a breathe like she had stubbed a toe, or broken a leg, or had been stabbed. 

None of them knew what to say for a long moment, so they said nothing. Because Noah had been their age when he had been murdered, and they were all that age now, living it, fumbling through it, just trying to get through high school and onto whatever the next thing was, that horizon beyond graduation and the future that it held. Noah didn’t have any of that and never would, no college or career or soulmate. 

None of them knew what to say, but Ronan said, “Well, fuck,” anyway. 

-

Ronan-of-many-secrets revealed them to his friends. He showed them how he could draw things -- impossible things -- out of his dreams. He showed them the Barns, by which he showed them his heart, whether they knew it or not. 

One secret, he kept for himself. 

After long hours of Glendower hunting, whether it was ley line tracking or Cabeswater foraging, usually ended with a roundup at Monmouth Manufacturing or Fox Way or Nino’s, Ronan would often volunteer to drive Adam -- who wore bags under his eyes like they were the hottest new fashion accessory -- back to St. Agnes, where he now lived. 

Ronan didn’t act like he was volunteering. Gansey might make the suggestion, saying he’d drive Blue and telling Ronan to do the same for Adam. Ronan would scoff, would roll his eyes. Gansey and Blue were not as subtle as they thought they were. It was the only good thing about Parrish being perpetually tired: he was too tired to notice his ex and his bestie awkwardly crushing on each other. 

No, Ronan didn’t act like he was volunteering. But he would nudge Adam with a sharp elbow and grunt “Let’s go” and play his techno blaringly loud the whole drive, glancing over when he could, at Adam’s profile. At the freckles across his sun-brown nose. At his slumped, forehead-to-the-window-glass posture. At the curved lines of him. 

Ronan looked, and sometimes Adam looked back. Those times, Ronan would drum his fingers on the steering wheel and feel gasoline inside. 

When they inevitably reached St. Agnes, Ronan would watch Adam cross the grounds, get inside the building, before peeling off, tires screeching, needing speed more in those moments than any other. 

AP. Adam Parrish. He could dream. 

He knew how powerful and dangerous a dream could be. 

-

When Gansey came into Blue’s house for a card reading, and kept drawing the Page of Cups -- Blue’s card -- it was all she and any of the psychics needed to know. It meant more to any of them than learning his name in full and knowing it matched up with the initials on Blue’s arm. 

She had already met him twice. Once, as the first and only spirit Blue had ever seen, on St. Mark’s Eve, and again in Nino’s. Like destiny was crashing them together. 

Of course destiny was crashing them together. Soulmates. 

But Blue watched some people search and search -- her classmates, Orla, the subjects of reality show documentaries -- to never find. Blue had determined herself not to search. To refuse. To hide. 

She could lie to herself and say she did her best to keep away from him by dating Adam instead, but she should’ve just stayed away from all them, all together. 

They never talked about it: initials, soulmates. Even as months passed, and Blue grew to know him, to see the duplicity of him. Gansey, the surface, dapper and refined, and the other Gansey. Unsure and ernest and an insomniac. Came to know his voice and paced breathing over the phone late at night. 

Came to take a drive alone with him, in the passenger seat of his orange camaro, to sit on the hood at the ridge, overlooking Henrietta, house lights and street lights looking like constellation on the ground, as the stars mapped out above their heads as well. 

He ran his thumb over her knuckles. How her hand came to be in his, she couldn’t exactly recall. It must’ve happened like magnets. 

“Jane,” he said, then cleared his throat. An oncoming breeze messed up his hair, dragging his bangs slantways across his forehead, making him look that much younger for it. 

“Blue,” he said. 

She sucked in a breath, like being stabbed again. He only said her real name when it was serious. 

“I know what you’re going to say,” she said. “Don’t.” 

He nodded, still staring down at her hands in his, and didn’t say a thing. 

Blue felt immensely, right then, like she wanted to cry. It wasn’t something she felt often. A rare emotion. 

She tucked her head against his shoulder, forehead against the smooth, warm skin of his neck. She could feel his pulse going at a conflicting beat to her own. He smelled like mint, and he smelled like a boy -- like he had accumulated the sweat of the day. She hated that she liked it, that it was comforting, that she wanted to pull it around herself like a blanket. 

At a distance, Gansey was everything she hated: a raven boy, a type of rich that made him discontented from the how the other 99% lived, pastel polo shirt and boat shoe wearing, an unerring polite that came across polished-manufactured. 

In reality, up close, with him an active ingredient in her life, he was something different. Someone who finished her yogurt, someone whom she wanted to call on the phone just to talk, someone whose smile for her was different from his smile for the rest of the world, someone whose edges she could see, someone whose smell she adored. 

He was her soulmate. She finally understood what that meant. And it wasn’t someone who drove you crazy with infatuation or lust. It was someone with whom you could sit silently, with your head on their shoulder, and not want to be anywhere else. 

He was her soulmate, and she his, and Blue wished she had never met him. So she could never kill him. So she would’ve never known what she would be missing. 

This is why she wouldn’t let him talk about it. 

-

Gansey wasn’t expecting Blue Sargent. 

He wasn’t sure what exactly he expected from his soulmate. A person like Blue, however, he couldn’t have possibly created in his imagination. She was so fiercely herself. 

He was lucky to have found her at all, living on borrowed time as he was. He was already supposed to be dead, and he would be dead again soon enough. He hadn’t told anyone else, but he had pieced it all together from its disparate webs. He was a researcher, after all, before almost everything else. 

Perhaps this was why he found it so hard to sleep. He was trying to fit in as much living as possible. 

There was no confirmation between Blue and him on the soulmate issue. He hadn’t shown her his initials, and she hadn’t shown him hers. They hadn’t said it with words, but they had very consciously not said it. 

But when they spoke late at night on the phone and his mind quieted down, or when he slipped his hand back between the seats in the crowd-filled camaro and she linked her fingers with his… He knew. 

-  
Henry Cheng had two han on his left arm. It was Hangul -- Korean script -- each han three characters arranged together to form a syllable. It was a quirk in the system, different languages, different rules. Latin based languages only got letters. He got the first syllable of his soulmate’s first and last name. 

Henry Cheng wasn’t looking for his soulmate. 

He wasn’t not looking, but he wasn’t looking either. If it happened, it happened. If it didn’t, he’d be fine. 

Here’s the thing, when he was a child he was kidnapped and held for ransom. He learned something valuable from that experience. Nothing in life was guaranteed, not even life itself. Everything on top of that, on surviving another day, was icing, and sprinkles, and whipped cream. Friendship, comfortable beds, parties, love. All of it. He’d take what come his way and be happy for it. Because if you couldn’t be unafraid, be afraid and happy.

-

Admitting to someone you thought they were your soulmate, that they matched the letters on your arm, was harder than admitting like-like or asking someone to prom. By the time you figured it out, usually it’s too soon to have fallen in love. What you’re admitting to is to the potential of love and of the future. 

And what’s scarier than the mystery of rest of your life?

That’s the question Blue posed to Henry at the toga party. Gansey had excused himself off to the bathroom a while ago and had yet to find his way back to them. Henry and Blue had made an easy but unpredictable connection, and baring your heart was easier in loud, drunken spaces. 

“They’re all going to leave me behind,” she said, shouting over the noise, but only heard as well as if it had been a whisper. “They’re going to graduate and move on, and I’m gonna be stuck here, never feeling this way again.”

“Then feel it all now,” Henry shouted back in confidence. Gansey squeezes out from amongst a clump of people, and catches sight of them from across the room. “The future’s not promised anyway.” 

-

Adam pressed two fingers over the initials. His pulse thrummed through his exposed veins in the crook of his elbow. Proof his heart was beating -- that he was alive. 

Life meant more than waking, working, then sleep. Life included initials, that meant there was someone out there that was meant for Adam, and Adam meant for that person in return. Life was the five of them crowded into Gansey’s camaro, off on the next adventure. It was going to Nino’s just to bug Blue at work. And moving Noah’s bones late at night so he could be strong enough to stay around. Letting Ronan teach him out to drive stick, or going over Latin homework together, or climbing into the basket of shopping cart to be pushed, rushing across the parking lot, just to hear Ronan’s delirious laughter. 

Adam dropped his fingers away, blinked at the RL. 

He guessed -- with how busy his mind was with homework, and calculating out how many hours he needed to work to pay rent and eat that month, with Cabeswater assigning him tasks, with plans for what’s next and next and next -- he could be forgiven for overlooking it for so long. 

He didn’t feel any different for Ronan, from this moment from the one just before, from unknowing to knowing. What he had new was understanding of what was already there: the beautiful contradiction of the buzzing under his skin, the looking-forward of being around someone, that the Ronan who once set him on edge now had a presence that set on ease. 

He blinked again as he looked at that mark on his arm. And kept looking and looking and looking. 

-

Despite all the magical mayhem that circulated their lives, they still had the time to gather at the Barns for a celebration. Seeing Ronan in his natural habitat, the place he had grown up, and with his brothers, was like seeing Ronan under an x-ray. It was seeing the truth of him, underneath the exterior. 

So when Ronan found and kissed Adam in his childhood bedroom, Adam knew not a second of it was a lie. Ronan at the Barns was Ronan at his most real, most exposed. He might seem like a live wire most days, but really he was a circuit of pure energy. 

Later, when the night had quieted down, and Adam had a chance to find Ronan alone on the porch, Adam kissed him back. It was satisfying: Ronan’s hissing breath, Ronan’s teeth, Ronan’s fingers rucked tight on the sides of Adam’s shirt. 

When they broke for air, Adam turned Ronan’s arm under a light grip. Ronan let him. He was wearing one of his t-shirts with the sleeves cut off, hiding nothing, but still Adam had never seen what was written in the crook of Ronan’s elbow. 

He saw it now. AP.

It shook him more than he anticipated, like an internal earthquake, down to his bones, to the depth of his gut, to see his initials on someone at all, and on this someone in particular. It wasn’t just that Adam had a soulmate, it was that he was the soulmate for someone else. That Adam Parrish was enough for someone. That Adam Parrish was someone’s answer. 

Adam stretched out his own right arm for Ronan to see. Ronan’s eyes skated over the spot, then back up to Adam’s face, to Adam’s eyes. 

They kissed again, long and hungry, not needing words, being men of action. 

-

The moment arrived. Blue had to kiss him. Blue had to kill him.

She had heard before -- mostly in the corny, Lifetime channel romances Orla liked to watch -- that dealing with the death of a soulmate was worse than suffering pretty much anything else in existence. 

Blue had always considered that hogwash. Sure, it would suck, especially for someone who put so much of their self-worth into the whole soulmate thing, but surely not so debilitatingly worse than the death of any other loved one. 

She stored up herself against this, but when it happened, when Gansey’s body went heavy and loose, it was like she had been scooped empty inside. 

Maybe it was because he was so young, or she was so young, or she had a role in it, or because death was still new to her. She had only ever lost Persephone before. These deaths hurt in crosssecting, but different ways. 

It was mercifully short-lived death, which is not something that can be said for most deaths. But even though Gansey was only dead for a few hours, Blue would still wake for many nights after, thinking the death was real and the resurrection a dream. For those few minutes, as she found the house phone and fumbled in Gansey’s number, waiting for him to answer, to confirm reality, it was like losing him again. 

She she knew, after these repeated nights, that losing a soulmate was a terrible fate. 

-

“I miss Noah.” 

It was Blue’s admission over Nino’s pizza but it reflected the sentiment of all four of them gathered there. It seemed appropriate to bring it up there, at this old haunt, even though Noah never ate. This was where all five of them had clashed together.

They were living in the aftermath, having survived hitmen and the third sleeper. They had saved Gansey. But they had lost Noah, Cabeswater, Aurora, Adam’s magic, their quest for Glendower. Some of these trades were more painful than others. 

Adam squeezed Ronan’s knee under the table. Noah and Ronan had been friends in a way that Adam hadn’t shared with Noah. A friend Ronan needed at the time he was most deeply wounded. 

“Maybe he’s at peace now,” Adam said. It came out as tentative and unsure as he felt about it. Adam didn’t have some set structure of beliefs, but he couldn’t be a complete skeptic towards things like the afterlife or whatever, not when Noah was literally a ghost, and Adam had had his own magic flowing through him, and people like Ronan existed. 

“Fucking deserved better,” Ronan said, scowling at his napkin like it personally betrayed him. “Deserved to live. Look at us assholes, sitting around with our soulmates. Noah didn’t even get to… get to graduate from high school.”

It was the perfect opening for someone to pop in a joke about Ronan not graduating from high school, but it wasn’t the perfect time, so no one did.

Gansey raised his plastic glass of coke and ice. “To Noah.” 

From any other Aglionby boy, this might’ve come off as cheeky, but not from Gansey, not now. 

-

Adam Parrish never thought he’d find something to anchor him in Henrietta, let alone his soulmate. Even as of right now, when he was making arrangements to move in the dorm at his college a handful of states northward, he was making opposite arrangements to come back to the Barns for Thanksgiving break. 

After seven squabbles on the topic, Ronan finally convinced Adam to give up his rented room at St. Agnes. 

All Ronan’s reasons made sense -- (“You spend most of your time here, anyway. Half your clothes are in my closet already. You’ll be giving it up soon enough. Might as well save the rent month for textbooks. I hear it’s a racket.”) -- but Adam was stubborn about things like his independence, about not having to owe anybody anything. He held his grown until Ronan added, “If you won’t move in with your fucking soulmate, then what’re we doing here?” 

Adam realized then that they had been having a conversation on two different wavelengths. Ronan had been trying to convince Adam to move in with him, not just trying to do Adam a favor. 

They were able to move the entirety of his possessions in one car ride. 

This Adam Parrish has never had before: a home to look forward to coming back to. 

-

Blue Sargent was ready for the rest of her life. For so long there had been only one path and her pursuit to avoid it: a soulmate, a kiss, a death. 

Now, she was stretched in the passenger’s seat of the engineless camaro Ronan had dreamed up for them, headed out of town, with no where in particular being their destination. Their destination was anywhere they wanted. 

Blue turned crooked in her seat to see into the back. “What do you think, Henry? Any exciting destinations you’re yearning for?”

Henry cracked his neck, squinted out through the window into the sun-glared world. “I go where the wind takes me, Miss Sargant.”

Blue turned to Gansey in the driver’s seat, shifting gears as he drove the car out onto the road from the parking lot of the convenience store they had stopped for a snack supply run. 

“Why don’t you ever speak to me so politely,” she said to him.

“I’m only ever polite to you, Jane,” Gansey replied in turn. 

“You called me a prostitute the first day we met.”

“I -- that was a complete misunderstanding --” Gansey said, at the same time Henry sputtered from the back, “You did what--?”, the same time Blue peeled with laughter. 

Blue rested her elbow on the rolled down window and pointed to the down the wide open road. “Excelsior.”

-

Ronan Lynch didn’t seem like the type to put much stock in soulmates. He kept to himself, mostly. He worked on his farm. Lived self-sufficiently. Went to Mass on Sunday morning. Stuck his nose out into town infrequently. 

Ronan took long, fast drives on empty roads at night whenever he felt that itch to do something reckless and dangerous. He had promised a lot of people to stop doing things that were reckless and dangerous. 

Ronan Lynch also had a satyr child who would sometimes latch onto his leg and not let go, and other times would bite his fingers if he tried to ruffle her hair, who was learning too many swear words from him, who he had birthed from his own dream-consciousness, and who was his responsibility now. Ronan had two brothers whom he loved. He had friends road-tripping their way across the nation and who sent him postcards from everywhere they hit. 

He also has a soulmate. Someone he got over his phone revulsion for, for phone calls right when night was getting into its deep hours. The conversations ended always the same, with Ronan telling Adam to put away his studying and sleep, and Adam telling Ronan to at least try to sleep at all. They only listened to the other’s suggestion 42 percent of the time, but a rare 3 percent of the time, one or the other or both would fall asleep during the call itself.

“I miss you,” Ronan said often. Adam would respond with information on his next school break and how many days counting down until it. It was his way of saying, ‘I miss you too.’

Despite the common misconceptions of appearances, Ronan Lynch put his full heart into the few, carefully picked things that were worth it.

-

There were a lot of fantasies in the world: bigfoot and Nessie and all that fairy tale stuff. Richard Campbell Gansey III believed in a lot of things, but he had never believed in happily ever afters before now. 

He was still awfully young to consider this an ‘ever after’ But he, along with his friends, had survived a storm of magical proportions most people would never face. He had survived death twice. He deserved a break. He deserved to kiss his soulmate on the knuckles and have her roll her eyes at him and blush at the same time. 

So Gansey believed in happily ever afters, and he believed in living one right now. 

It wasn’t exactly like the storybooks, where the ‘happily ever after’ happened in the blank space at the end, left only to the imagination. It was heavy work, carrying their wounds. Ronan still mourned his parents. Adam had the nature of his childhood in his DNA. Henry and Gansey had an understanding about fear and the way it shaped you like a sculptor. Sometimes Gansey caught Blue looking at him like she couldn’t believe he was real, tangible, and alive. But Gansey believed they could make it through, he and his friends and his soulmate.

Gansey believed in impossible things, and he would never stop believing.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you all enjoyed my first TRC fic. Any failure at representing the Korean language was the failure of the author.


End file.
